8-year-old Newfoundland boy beat dog to death: RCMP

A Newfoundland community is shaken after an eight-year-old boy confessed to the RCMP that he beat a dog to death with a barbecue fork.

Police say they can’t charge the boy, since he is under the age of 12, but the case has been referred to social services.

“It is very alarming,’’ Bonnie Harris, manager for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Gander, who said she has never heard of a child treating an animal that way. ‘‘I would seriously be very concerned if I was living in that community with a pet. You never know what else might happen with a child with that amount of rage.’’

On June 3, Norman Hodder and his wife, Emma, returned to their Stoneville, Nfld. home at 3:30 p.m. with their black Pomeranian, Cuddles, in tow. Sensing he wanted to play, the couple tied him to the clothesline in their yard, as they often did, and let him run around the garden.

As Ms. Hodder prepared to go to work for the evening, they decided to leave Cuddles outside. It was a warm summer night. “The next morning when Norman went out, he was dead on his leash,” Ms. Hodder said.

The pair buried their eight-year-old Pomeranian, despite the bloody fork lying underneath the dog on the lawn and markings on his snout. She didn’t want to think about it, Ms. Hodder, 53, said, and assumed it died of natural causes.

It wasn’t until a neighbour told her she had seen the boy from across the road, well-known in the tiny rural community, the night before jumping up and down in the Hodders’ yard and beating something with the fork that Ms. Hodder reconsidered.

When Ms. Harris contacted her hoping to exhume the dog’s body and do an autopsy, after hearing about the case from a Stoneville resident, the Hodders agreed. Cuddles’ cause of death? Blunt force trauma.

Mr. Hodder confronted the father of the boy, telling him: “It’s my own personal tragedy.” The father agreed to reimburse Mr. Hodder $500 for the cost of the dog.

And now, the community is in an uproar, Ms. Hodder said. “They’re fearing for their kids.”

It’s not the first time the boy has caused a ruckus in the neighbourhood, she said. “He’s been round here lots of times, just roaming around, but he’s never done anything as bad as that,” she said. “Apparently a lot of people around here have had trouble with him, throwing rocks at the kids, things like that.”

A family member said the boy and his older half-brother have been disciplined for bringing pocket knives on the school bus.
The boy’s father, who lives with his parents, said the boy has two dogs of his own at his mother’s home. He largely shrugged the incident off in an interview yesterday.

“Yeah, it’s not a very good thing for him to do. But the dog is dead, you can’t bring him back,” he said.

Sergeant Boyd Merrill, RCMP media relations officer, said because the boy is under the age of 12, he can’t be charged with a crime. The case has now been passed on to social services.

“We would have got the call initially, and we would have made the referral to social services to deal with it,” Sgt. Merrill said. Eastern Health in Newfoundland is the social agency overseeing the case, he said.

The boy is still at his mother’s home, a family member said. His mother declined to comment.

Stoneville, Nfld., is near Carmanville, a community approximately 400 kilometres north of St. John’s.